Weeknotes 02/2022

Work

The biggest change in ways of working at Elastic for me is that we're releasing software at defined intervals. I know similar release cadences from the mobile teams from previous companies (release trains they were called at SoundCloud 🚂). However, I got used to the process of deploying often, pretty much daily. The web team at SoundCloud would deploy PRs in batches, multiple times per day.

Of course this kind of release cadence does not make sense for software like Elasticsearch and Kibana. They are not consumer-facing apps but actual released pieces of software that comes in form of bundles. When you find a bug in a consumper app, you fix the bug in main, create a PR, run the tests, have someone look over it and deploy the same day. The process for released software is exactly that but you'll have to make sure to bring the fix to main and backport it to all releases that are in long-term support. 🏄‍♂️ And they're released at defined intervals.

A lot of this process is automated in Kibana and in most cases your backport PRs will merge just fine (🤞). It took me some time to get used to this way of working but now I appreciate it a lot. I feel less stressed about releasing every day and I have the feeling I allow myself more time to go into detail when reviewing other people's work.

That being said, it can get quite stressful when there is a major release on the horizon 🌅

Side projects

Over the winter holidays I picked up work on an older project again. A mini game that I built for the first time 11 years ago. Back then it was a showcase for a web build tool called Brunch that I was working on with friends. That was back in the days when the field of web build tools was pretty empty. The original game was written in Backbone and CoffeeScript. Oh, and it was hosted as a Couchapp inside of a CouchDB instance. 🤯 Those were wild days <3

Anyways, I started to rebuild the game with a more modern stack. Back then it only had a single-player mode, this time I started out with a multiplayer mode right away and still have to add the single player mode. The design is still very sub-par and I want to make the server a little more robust but it already feels like I will actually be able to release a side project this year 😅

Little teaser video:

Life

For the first time after a long injury I was finally able to go back bouldering 🎉 Needless to say, my entire body has been feeling sore for three days now 😅 Looking forward to getting back into that routine.

Entertainment

🍿 Brooklyn Nine-Nine has become our new go-to show for a quick snack and I'm soooooo in love with the show 🥲

🍿 I'm so mad at The Expanse. I loved all the new arcs that opened up in the final two episodes and now it's over. Just like that. 😭 I hope they'll one day continue producing the show. For now though, I think I'll have to start reading the books.

📚 I'm slowly starting to get into graphic novels and my absolute favorite in the last months was Daytripper. A collection of bitter-sweet stories about life and death.

Song of the week

Something funky / souly for this week. I've listened to this song SO many times and I still can't believe that the artist hasn't blown up yet. 💃 Delv!s - Come My Way 🕺